57 pages • 1 hour read
An Outpost Of Progress
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Character Analysis
Kayerts
Kayerts enters the story as an overweight, mild-mannered but officious nobody, happy to be gifted with a thankless low-echelon job in an isolated outpost, an appointment for which he is eminently unqualified. Back in Belgium, he had served for a time as an administrator in the government telegraph offices, and as he tells the Director of the outpost company, he “knew how to express himself correctly” (Part 1, Paragraph 1). The logic is of course specious, like a librarian claiming that job ipso facto makes them a great writer. He is the most dangerous kind of fool: one completely unaware of how foolish he is.
This sort of pretense is at the core of Kayerts’s character. For him, the appointment at the outpost is his chance to represent Belgium, to be a sort of paragon of civilized manners and cultured living. Exposed to an unfamiliar world where his sense of civilization is deeply compromised, and where he must fall back on his own minimal resources to maintain focus within a vast and oppressive jungle wilderness, Kayerts summarily experiences mental health issues and gives into the feral nature his upbringing had convinced him was irrelevant to who he was. He too quickly agrees to the illegal slave trade that Makola directs, and after he kills Carlier he agrees to hush up the murder.
Under the pressure of the remote outpost, this nondescript man commits a brutal and entirely pointless murder (of his only friend) before hanging himself, which testifies to how easily and completely civilization can be lost. His cultured upbringing, his self-perception of his status as a white man bringing European civilization to the outback of the African Congo, even his pretense to being an exemplum of European moral integrity, all become ironic in the end. Before he hangs himself, Kayerts stumbles into the Congo morning shrouded with a hanging fog. “He looked round like a man who has lost his way” (Part Two, Paragraph 77). Indeed.
Carlier
The new assistant director of operations at the outpost, Carlier arrives as another presumed paragon of European culture and civilization exported to the jungles of the Congo to bring that remote and inhospitable world a sense of moral direction. Before accepting the Congo posting, he was a career officer in the cavalry of the Belgian national army. Carlier is wildly deluded. The narrator, however, is something less than impressed: Carlier is in the Congo only because his wife’s family was tired of his mooching.
Although Carlier is approachable to Kayerts and the two enjoy an amicable relationship as they settle into life in the outpost, Carlier quickly reveals his inclination not to work. He puffs his cigars on the veranda of the post’s hut, fishes the river endlessly (and futilely), and starts a few minor repairs before succumbing to the malaise triggered by the tropical heat. Like Kayerts, he goes along with the slave trade Makola negotiates. After only a few months at the outpost, Carlier feels disconnected from himself, or at least the part of him that was cultured, civilized, and moral. “It was not the absolute and dumb solitude of the post that impressed [him] so much as an inarticulate feeling that something from within [him] was gone” (Part Two, Paragraph 66).
In the increasingly ironic world of the Belgian Congo, Carlier provokes his own killing when he simply speaks the truth. The showdown, however, is ignoble since it’s really just a fight over a spoon or two of sugar. Provoked when Kayerts denies him any of the rationed sugar for his coffee, he calls out Kayerts for agreeing to the slave trade and labels him exactly what he is: a slave trader. The ensuing fight between the two is as pointless as it is absurd. The two supposedly civilized men chase each other like “cornered and frantic” (Part Two, Paragraph 77) animals around the tiny hut. His murder just happens—the narrator records the sound of the gun going off and then the grim evidence of Carlier’s bloody corpse. In that pointless and vicious shooting (Carlier, although the military man, is unarmed), Conrad exposes the confusion and moral chaos of the jungle that has so quickly destroyed the moral integrity of both men, “life suddenly more terrible and difficult than death” (Part 2, Paragraph 80).
Makola
Makola, the local from Sierra Leone who directs much of the outpost operations, embodies the story’s concept of the paradoxical nature of every person—every person is exactly how they present themselves and exactly the opposite of how they present themselves, a dizzying world of deception and shadows that in the end neither Belgian traders can accept. Makola’s name suggests this dual nature: he is Makola, certainly, but he insists on being called Henry Price, a name that not only suggests white culture but darkly suggests Makola’s pragmatic, if mercenary, nature: Everything in his world has a price.
Without irony, Makola self-consciously balances European and African identities. On one hand, he has adapted the affectations of a civilized European: He is married with three children, speaks English and French, and he basically runs the outpost given the indifference and general indolence of the two Belgians. It is Makola who understands the complicated realities of the outpost’s antiquated bookkeeping system. But he is not entirely Europeanized since “[h]e wrote a beautiful hand, understood bookkeeping, and cherished in his innermost heart the worship of evil spirits” (Part 1, Paragraph 1).
His cool negotiations with the rogue band of ivory traders—trading expensive ivory for the outpost’s Black workers—is at once as offensive as it is logical, as heinous as it is routine. For Makola, the deal is strictly business, an expression of the corrupt Western mindset that long placed a greater value on objects than people. Compared to Makola’s calm and reasonable explanation of the deal, Kayerts’s protestations seem tinny, hollow, and shrill. Later, it is Makola who pragmatically offers to dispose of the untidy evidence of Carlier’s murder.
Makola does what neither Kayerts nor Carlier manage to do: he lives in the Congo jungle and does not allow it to affect his mental health. In his adjustment to that complex world, he is as threatening as he is indispensable, as vile as he is heroic, as corrupt as he is practical.
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